Silk strings in early European music

Music from the Time of Marco Polo could imagine a 13th century Gothic harp with silk strings.
Music from the time of Matteo Ricci could imagine a 16th century Western lute with silk strings (as in the image at right)

However, that program is imagined as taking place in China. According to my conception, although there is evidence suggesting that some early Western instruments may have used silk strings back home, here the suggestion is that perhaps any Western stringed instruments available in China at the time of Marco Polo or Matteo Ricci may have needed replacements for whatever strings the instruments originally had, and so silk strings may have been used.

Some evidence for the use of silk strings in medieval and renaissance Europe includes the following (also see more detail):

Silk string is known to have existed in Europe even before medieval times; its uses included for fishing line, and a 16th century source mentions a fisherman using a catgut lute string as a fishing line.
Some early records mention strings vibrating for up to 10 seconds after being struck: gut strings vibrate a second or two at most, but silk vibrations can continue for 10 seconds.
The biggest expense for string instrument players was string-replacement: gut strings could break very easily and often; thus, although silk strings would have been very expensive, the fact that they can last for years makes the likelihood of their use less remote, even if the silk strings had to be imported (here it would be good to know more about the composition of strings used in the Moorish regions of Spain).
The etymology of the word "catgut" is disputed. One theory suggests that the word "caterpillar" comes from the old northern French word "catepelos" expression, which literally means "wooly cat"; caterpillers are the producers of silk and most European caterpillars are wooly in appearance. This suggests that "catgut" might originally have referred to silk cord.
The general assumption is that stringed instruments usually used gut for the strings; gut strings are made from sheep's gut, and rarely is any reason given as to how it came to be called "catgut". In fact, medieval and renaissance sources rarely mention the actual material used for the strings, and when they do mention this they often specify both "sheep's gut" and "cat's gut", as though they are different.

Countering this last etymology, scholars today seem generally to think that "catgut" came from "kitgut" through folk etymology, "kit" being the name of a small fiddle. I have not read the details of that argument.

With regard to the last comment, there are also a number of other etymologies not related to silk: one is that "catgut" comes from "catapult gut". In addition, the word catgut can be seen in some old dictionaries as the name of a type of twisted rope tied on a sailing boat to a protective piece of wood called a "cat".

Silk strings on other Western instruments A "Chancellor" violin string (expand)

The image at right, from 王耕 Wang Geng, shows a "Chancellor violin string".

According to Alexander Raykov (who also sent this related price list),

The German Chancellor string was probably made by an arm of the old British - American company that was selling violin - cello accessories as late as 1950s. The "Chancellor" brand name seems to be one of the eternal favorites of the musical companies: right now there is a "Chancellor" drum company and I still see sometimes "Chancellor" violin bridges and chin rests.

Apparently there were at least three distinct places in Europe making silk strings, one each in Italy, France and Germany, and possibly one in England, too. These three or four silk string making centers apparently supplied most of the companies that packaged and sold the strings to musicians. Again from as late as the 1950s I have seen a variety of brands clearly being supplied from each of the first three places. Most of them are clear in appearance, cooked in clear gelatine, many of them were varnished, some with quite heavy varnish. It was traditional in European gut string making, and it was probably felt that a silk string would "hair out" less if it was covered with varnish.

The clearness of a string, that seems to attract the fancy so much, can be a result of one of two things:

The worm is fed and bred in such a way that the sericin structure is close in its optical diffraction qualities to the fibroin, and then the glue is chosen wisely so as not to disrupt this in the mix. The resulting string can be as clear as modern nylon.

Use a special glue. Most of the violin silk strings that I have seen (and the fly fishing leaders produced in a similar fashion) do this, clearly using degummed fibroin, where some mixture of gelatin - sea plant gums and glues were used as the glue. The glue is clear, and the resulting string looks nearly transparent. The ones I have somewhere in my possession (misplaced I fear) while looking clear and nice, are very fragile and easily damaged, quite useless as instrument strings. It might have to do with the damage suffered by the fibroin, mostly from the UV sun rays.

Sericin does offer some UV protection, but most of the glues I have mentioned do not. From the standpoint of string longevity I would suggest that keeping the original fiber sericin, or adding it to the glue would be important.

Alexander also added further updates to his comments on silk strings.

As for other uses of silk strings in Europe, some time ago Per-Ulf Allmo informed me that "Polish fiddles in the 15th and 16th centuries as well as old Swedish nyckelharpa always had the highest string made of silk".³

Footnotes (Shorthand references are explained on a separate page)

1. This page was damaged and needs fixing.
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2. Source of silk strings in early Western music?
This website largely concerns historically informad performance of guqin music from before the mid 17th century. This naturally requires the use of silk strings, as none other were known to have been available at the time: only during the Cultural Revolution were silk strings introduced as part of a policy of making the guqin into more of a performance instrument. A natural curiosity led to speculation as to whether silk strings could be part of an historically-informed performance of early Western musiic, and this led to an enquiry into where those strings would have come from. The present page is a preliminary search for what could have been the source of such strings. The most obvious likely source would not be China itself, but the Islamic world stretching from the borders of China in Central Asia to across Western Asia, North Africa and into Spain. Did they use strings from China, or did they cevelop their own methods for making them?

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